More in Movies »

FILM

FILM; The American Tragedy Is a Family Affair

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: January 11, 2004

FEW words in English suffer from such overuse and misuse as tragedy, an ancient literary term that has come to refer, in modern vernacular, to just about anything bad. The word embraces unfathomable horrors and everyday mishaps; natural disasters, political atrocities and instances of plain bad luck are all commonly described as tragic. This can of course be seen as a debasement of the language: yet another venerable word stripped of its dignity and particularity and pitched into the muddy linguistic mainstream of banality and imprecision.

But you might also say that the habit of giving the regal name of tragedy to every untimely death or untoward circumstance transforms an old aristocratic entitlement into part of the universal democratic birthright. The heroic, awesome destinies once reserved for mythic kings and queens are now available to the rest of us.

The liberal use of the word is thus also a way of distributing its balm more widely: at least since Aristotle, tragedy has been understood as an explicitly therapeutic dramatic form, a purgative treatment for lingering social maladies. Modern Americans are great gourmandizers of therapy, and if we still shy away from the pity and terror that Aristotle identified as the cleansing emotions of tragedy, we are, perhaps more than ever, eager for the individual healing and collective redemption that he understood to be their outcome.

It may be that American movies, after years of strenuously avoiding the downbeat and the desolate, have belatedly discovered the ancient formula of feeling bad as a step toward feeling better. It may also be that the unassimilable horror of Sept. 11 has seeped into the cultural groundwater, and that movies like ''House of Sand and Fog,'' ''Mystic River'' and ''21 Grams'' are oblique and piecemeal responses to that event, making reference to its defining emotions of dread and grief rather than to its specific sights, sounds and political consequences. (Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of ''21 Grams,'' and Sean Penn, one of its stars, also contributed to ''September 11,'' an anthology of short films about the attacks released last summer. Mr. González Iñárritu's segment was harrowing in its directness, while Mr. Penn's was irritating for its coy ambiguity.)

But for whatever reason, it does seem that, like the realist playwrights of the 1940's and 50's, a number of filmmakers are challenging the assumption that the optimistic, progressive character of American society is incompatible with the gravity and darkness of genuine tragedy.

The very title of ''House of Sand and Fog,'' Vadim Perelman's concise and elegant distillation of Andre Dubus III's novel, suggests a certain amount of gravity and darkness, and the somber tones of Roger Deakins's cinematography and James Horner's score foreshadow a grim end before anything much has happened. (Since tragedy is by definition a matter of sad endings, be warned that I will be giving some away). Mr. Perelman is less interested in the look of tragedy than in its logic; he wants us to understand it not so much as a mood surrounding a series of events but as a mode of narration linking them together in logical sequence.

The film's tight, remorseless logic is both an impressive achievement and, when you step back from the suffocating intensity of its conclusion, something of a flaw. The principal antagonists, a former officer in the Iranian military (played by Ben Kingsley) and a recovering addict (Jennifer Connelly) are brought into conflict over a piece of property, and Mr. Perelman and the actors labor mightily to furnish this modest California bungalow with murderous, uncontrollable passions.

For Ms. Connelly's character, Kathy, the house represents the childhood happiness and family connections she has squandered or otherwise lost, whereas for Mr. Kingsley's colonel it promises a restoration of the status and stability he gave up when he left his homeland. The idea of home as a value potentially greater than life itself is a powerful one, yet the very condition that grounds it -- the migratory, rootless nature of American life, the relative ease with which people dissolve bonds of affection and place -- makes it somewhat implausible.

While ''21 Grams'' is as jagged and corrosive as ''Sand and Fog'' is smooth and somber, it suffers a similar fate: it wants to find tragedy in randomness and disconnection and winds up making its contrivances all the more glaring. Like Kathy, the colonel and the sheriff's deputy in Mr. Perelman's film, the three main characters in Mr. González Iñárritu's movie are linked by pure contingency. Naomi Watts's husband was killed in a hit-and-run accident by Benicio del Toro's character, and the dead man's heart was transplanted into Sean Penn's body. He and his donor's widow fall into an affair, and she persuades him to take revenge on the killer, whose guilt has driven him to abandon his own family. The fractured chronology and the dedication of the actors can make you overlook the preposterousness of this situation, but as with ''Sand and Fog'' it is hard to avoid the sense that the story and its attendant emotions are somehow incommensurate.

And this may be because the filmmakers have misjudged the landscape of feeling they set out to survey. They assume that the United States is a land of loneliness and anomie, and that these, under pressure, explode into anguished violence. Those variables are accurately identified, but somehow the equations these movies propose do not quite balance. The violence that issues from rootlessness and isolation is more likely to be the affectless, absurd brutality explored in Gus Van Sant's ''Elephant,'' which pointedly dispenses with narrative logic altogether, and which also ruthlessly denies its audience anything resembling catharsis.

''Twenty-one Grams'' and ''Sand and Fog'' -- along with ''Monster,'' Patty Jenkins's wrenching biography of Aileen Wuornos, who was executed as a serial killer in Florida -- suggest that tragedy arises when the bonds of family and community are too weak and too thin. But tragedy, traditionally, is what happens when these bonds are too strong, when they entangle and distort the individual will with the force of law and tradition.

This may be why, in spite of its own credulity-stretching turns of plot, Clint Eastwood's ''Mystic River'' is a more potent and persuasive film than ''21 Grams'' or ''Sand and Fog.'' Far from being cut loose from home and family, its main characters (and, once again, there are three of them) share ties of kinship, neighborhood and childhood trauma, none of which they seem able, or even particularly willing, to escape. If Kathy and the colonel are united (and divided) by their homelessness, the three boyhood chums in ''Mystic River'' -- Sean Penn's Jimmy, Tim Robbins's Dave and Kevin Bacon's Sean -- are, if anything, fatally at home in the working-class Boston neighborhood where the film takes place.

The milieu, like that in a Greek or Jacobean play, is tribal, and its codes of family solidarity and blood vengeance give even its most senseless acts of violence a solemn, terrible meaning.